Rovio's Angry Birds .... are you addicted ??

Children enjoy playing (earlier days they used to play outside – now glued to computers / laptops / tabs / mobiles) ~ and not all those who play are children… in trains, buses (and inside some offices too…) one can find people glued to their mobiles ….. there are so many popular games – in one such game - players use catapults to fire infuriated birds at pigs hiding inside buildings made of planks. It is a smash hit literally – ‘Angry Birds’ – (how many levels have you cleared !)

- You are given a slingshot to fire your angry birds at pigs who are placed within different variations of structures (such as wood, ice and stone) which progressively get harder and retrieve the eggs that those pesky pigs stole!.... as you advance, you get chance to use varied birds with special abilities.  A blue bird when clicked will split into 3 – there are birds which will explode – some which can drop explosive eggs … there are smaller and larger pigs – the challenge is to destroy all pigs with the available birds – if you use less, you get bonus points … some pigs wear helmets as armor, making them even more resistant to damage, while pigs with crowns can take the most damage.

The most popular ‘Angry Birds’  is a strategy game developed by Finnish computer game developer Rovio Mobile. Inspired primarily by a sketch of stylized wingless birds, the game was first released for Apple's iOS in December 2009. Since that time, over 12 million copies of the game have been purchased from Apple's App Store, which has prompted the company to design versions for other touchscreen-based smartphones, such as those using the Android operating system, among others.  Angry Birds has been praised for its successful combination of addictive game play, comical style, and low price. Its popularity led to versions of Angry Birds being created for personal computers and gaming consoles, a market for merchandise featuring its characters and even long-term plans for a feature film or television series.

It is stated that Rovio staff stumbled upon this in early 2009. As the concept of Angry Birds was developed, the staff realized the birds needed an enemy and as "swine flu" epidemic was in the news,  they made the birds' enemies pigs.  In early 2010, Rovio began developing a variant of Angry Birds for Facebook. Future improvements planned for the game include the ability to synchronize the player's progress across multiple devices; for example, a player who completes a level on an iOS device could log into their copy of the game on an Android device and see the same statistics and level of progress.

The initial iOS version of the game included a single episode entitled "Poached Eggs", which contained three themed chapters, each with 21 levels. From time to time, Rovio has released free upgrades that include additional content, such as new levels, new in-game objects and even new birds. As updates have been released, they have been incorporated into the game's full version offered for download from each platform's application store. Understand that the new bird - the Mighty Eagle, can  be used once per hour to clear any uncompleted levels.  Reviews of Angry Birds have been highly positive. According to Rovio, players log more than 1 million hours of game time each day on the iOS version of the game, 3.33 million hours per day across all platforms and 40 million monthly active users. In the history of the Apple App Store, Angry Birds holds the record for most days at the top of the Paid Apps chart, having spent a total of 275 days at the No.1 position. 

The Angry Birds characters have been referenced in television programs throughout the world. The Israeli comedy show Eretz Nehederet (a Wonderful Country), satirized the failed Israeli-Palestinian peace attempts by featuring the Angry Birds in peace negotiations with the pigs. Angry Birds and its characters have been featured in advertisements for other products. In March 2011, the characters began appearing in a series of advertisements for Microsoft's Bing search engine. The game's popularity has spawned knock-off and parody games that utilize the same basic mechanics as Angry Birds. The game's official website offers plush versions of the birds and pigs for sale, along with T-shirts featuring the game's logo and characters. Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio Mobile, has envisioned a feature film in the stop-motion animation style of Aardman Animation. To that end, Rovio has purchased a Helsinki-based animation studio to prepare Angry Birds short cartoons on Nickelodeon.  According to news reports an animated 3D movie is  due to be released in 2016 by Sony Pictures on July 1, 2016. 

The picture that you saw at the start of the post – is real angry birds attacking a fox attempting to steal eggs.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

21^st July 2014.